


The Move

by SerenLyall



Series: Burn the book that says you took the Autumn [1]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, and was fun to write, bookshop au, celebrian is a bright flower child, there's not much that happens in this one; it just kind of sets stuff up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 12:50:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20447432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerenLyall/pseuds/SerenLyall
Summary: In which Celebrían moves into her new apartment.





	The Move

**Author's Note:**

> A quick note on this universe: it is a parallel universe to ours. This is set in the United States - but an alternate US than we are used to. All names are Elvish names, and there are a few differences (such as Noble Families) in it.
> 
> As I said in the tags, not a lot happens in this one. It's mostly a character study, and kind of sets some things up for future fics. I hope you can still enjoy, though!

Celebrían of the Celebdil Family is excited.

“Are you sure you have everything you need?” her mother, Galadriel of the Finwë Family asks. “All of your clothes are packed? You haven’t forgotten anything in the basement? Your bathroom is clean?”

Celebrían laughs and lovingly rolls her eyes. “Yes, Mother,” she says with an air of long-suffering patience. “And even if the answer was no to any of those things, I am only moving across town. I can always come back and clean the bathroom if it is not up to your standards.”

Galadriel chuckles, then draws Celebrían into a tight hug. “I am going to miss you,” she says, smoothing Celebrían’s hair away from her forehead and tucking it behind her ears. She leans in then and presses a kiss to Celebrían’s forehead.

“Never fear,” says Celebrían lightly, “I will be home again this weekend for dinner to tell you all about the move,” she promises.

Her mother and father, Celeborn, had offered to help her with the move—but Celebrían had refused. “This is something I have to do myself,” she told them firmly over dinner a month before, when plans for the move had just begun to get underway. They had been sitting in the dining nook in the kitchen, rather than in the dining room, for Celeborn had made dinner that night in a quiet celebration of Celebrían’s graduation from college. They had given their cook the night off—though they had retained their housekeeper, who had offered to clean up the kitchen and table once they were done—and Celeborn had grilled venison steaks with seasoning, kabobed vegetables, and fresh fruit from the farmer's market on the east side of town.

“Why?” Galadriel had asked.

“This is my chance to branch out and become my own woman,” said Celebrían. “This is my chance at growing up—and proving, to myself and to you, that I can do this. That I can be my own woman and my own person.”

Celeborn had smiled at that. “Very well,” he had agreed. “But at least let us help you pack?”

That, Celebrían had agreed to.

“All ready?” Celeborn asks, walking in through the front door of the family’s large home. He leaves the front door open, though the screen door bangs shut behind him. Through it, Celebrían can see the moving truck sitting in the driveway, the big, brawny movers perched on the truck's bench in the cab, waiting for her.

“I am,” Celebrían says with a smile—and then flings herself into her father’s arms. He hugs her fiercely, and she hugs him back, gripping him tightly. “I’m going to miss you,” she whispers to her father.

“And I you, my little flower,” Celeborn replies, using the childhood endearment he had given Celebrían when she was three.

Celebrían steps back, away from her father, then squares her shoulders. “Okay,” she says, nodding once—though whether to herself or to her parents, she is not sure. “Okay,” she says again, suddenly regretting her adamant choice not to allow her parents to come with her to her new apartment. “Okay,” she says a third time. Then, “I’m ready.”

Outside, the taxi waiting to take her to her new apartment honks impatiently. Celebrían rolls her eyes again, but picks up her purse and collects her keys and jacket from their hooks in the coat closet—it is spring, but early spring in the mountains is still cold at night—and squares her shoulders. Giving her parents one last smile, and blowing them each a kiss, she turns and walks out of the house and down the steps to the circle roundabout that serves as the house's front driveway. A second drive marches long and straight from the roundabout to the street, coasting beneath a boulevard of trees.

Celebrían goes to the taxi and opens the door. She slides into the back seat, closes the door, then presses close to the window so she can see her parents, who have come out to the front steps of their large family estate. They wave, smiling brightly through the sadness she can see lurking in their eyes and on their lips, and Celebrían smiles and waves in return.

“Okay,” she tells the taxi driver—a short, balding Hispanic man who, in spite of his thinning hair, sports a full beard. The taxi driver grunts, then starts the yellow car. The engine rumbles to life, echoed by the moving truck—and then they pull away from the front steps, around the roundabout, and off down the boulevard.

The drive to Celebrían’s new apartment takes nearly half an hour in the first vestiges of rush-hour traffic. The sun is riding low on the cityscape's horizon when they reach the apartment complex, turning the sky orange and red and gold. A few clouds hang in bands across the heavens, and their edges burn like flames, their hearts like embers.

The taxi parks in front of the staircase leading up to Celebrían’s apartment, the moving truck pulling in behind them. Celebrían thanks the driver, pays him, then gets out of the car and closes the door. The taxi drives off.

The movers open the cab door and step down, out of the truck front. “Well, Ms. Celebdil?” the right man asks. “What would you have us do?”

He is tall, with shoulders as broad as a mountain and the shadow of a beard darkening his broad jaw. His hands are scarred with a dozen tiny, white lines that remind Celebrían of the remnants of paper cuts. He had introduced himself as Delhabad.

His companion, Dagorael, is smaller than him, more wiry than broad, but still sporting defined muscles and a strong jaw. His eyes are a bright, bright blue, and his lips are full and ready to smile in an instant.

“Let’s go up and look at the apartment,” says Celebrían. “That way we can figure out what to put where, before we do the heavy lifting.”

Delhabad and Dagorael nod and agree, then follow Celebrían up the concrete staircase to the second floor. There, Celebrían produces a key, and then guides them to the last door in a line of three. She unlocks it, and pushes it open, admitting the two movers before she walks in herself.

The apartment is large and full of windows. The door opens onto the living room, complete with a barren hearth and a wall full of floor-to-ceiling windows, the floor carpeted in rich beige. Through the living room is the kitchen. It is longer than it is wide, with a small nook—not unlike the circular kitchen nook back at her parents' house—for a table at the end, the half-circle made of more windows still. A stove sits amid a sea of counters, mixed in with a sink, a refrigerator beneath an even wider sea of cupboards, and a built-in microwave.

The hallway that marches past the kitchen leads into the bedroom and the bathroom, the apartment's washing machine and dryer hookups behind sliding doors to the right. The bedroom is square, with another wall of floor-to-ceiling windows across from the door. They open onto a balcony overlooking a green lawn filled with a pond and playing fountain, beyond which sits a low garden wall and then a street lined with small shops. Beyond that is the cityscape.

Celebrían’s florist shop, whose grand opening is in three days, is in that strip of shops: a narrow, but tall, green-doored building with a brick face and two square windows with flowerboxes to either side. It is sandwiched between a small coffee shop and a bookshop, both as quaintly decorated as her flower shop.

The last room in the apartment is the bathroom. It is as large and spacious as the rest of the apartment, with a tub big enough for Celebrían to lay down in, a toilet, a sink and mirror, counters and cabinets, and a large walk-in closet. The floor is pale tile, the walls painted a soft white that accents the whorled grey marble of the countertops, and the silver frame around the mirror. This is the only room in the entire apartment without a window.

After doing her first walk through the apartment, Dagorael and Delhabad following behind, Celebrían points out where she wants each piece of furniture she brought, and where stacks of boxes can go. Once she is done with that, the movers disappear through the door to begin their unloading.

It takes the movers nearly an hour to finish unloading the truck. By the time they are done, night has fallen, and the air has begun to grow chilly. The sky is a tapestry of stars, the moon an eyelash as he lifts his head above the cityscape horizon.

Celebrían orders pizza for her and the movers. It arrives just before they are done unloading, and she spends the last five minutes before they are rooting around in boxes for plates and napkins. She finds them at last, straightening from a mess of packing paper and opened boxes with a cry of triumph, and then juggles the three red-rimmed plates and the wooden box filled with napkins over to the table tucked into the nook at the end of the kitchen.

“Please,” Celebrían says, once the movers finish bringing in their last load of boxes, “stay for a minute and eat.”

“We couldn’t,” Delhabad protests. “Our job…”

“Is done for the day,” Celebrían points out. “Unless someone else is moving tonight? After dark? In the cold?” She grins. “Besides,” she adds, “how am I going to eat all this pizza by myself?”

“Come on,” Dagorael says, looking at his older companion with what almost looks like pleading. “We can stay for a couple of minutes.”

Delhabad sighs, but then smiles. “Thank you, Ms. Celebdil,” he says, sounding very official, “we accept your offer.” Then he laughs, shattering the mood, and pulls a chair up to the table to seize a slice of pepperoni pizza.

The three eat and laugh and talk, about the weather and about the city’s soccer team and about the movers' job the next day. They tell Celebrían that they will be moving a little, old lady out of her mansion and into a much smaller, more manageable two-bedroom house.

“She has a replacement hip,” says Dagorael, “and she walks with a limp. Yet apparently it took her daughters a year and a half to convince her to let them have the mansion and to move into a place a bit more manageable for her.”

Celebrían laughs, then adds, “That sounds just like my mother.”

“Your mother is Galadriel of the Finwё Family, isn’t she?” Delhabad asks shrewdly.

Celebrían nods.

The Finwё Family was one of the “Noble Families” of the United States: wealthy, politically powerful families who dominated pop culture and were held with high esteem by the people of the nation. The Finwё Family was the greatest of the Noble Families, with the Fёanorion Family, and the House of Melian standing just beneath them; the Celebdil Family, among a few others, such as the Gondolidrim, made up the lesser ranks of the Noble Families.

Celebrían herself was the daughter of a union between the Finwё Family—her mother, Galadriel, was the youngest daughter of the Finwё Family—and the Celebdil Family, which was a distinct offshoot of the House of Melian.

“What is it like,” Dagorael asks, “being the daughter of a Noble Family?”

“A lot of responsibility and expectation,” says Celebrían almost instantly. “I have a lot to live up to. If I do not make a name for myself in some way or other, then I will surely be a failure to my family—and my family does not take failure of its children well.”

Delhabad pulls a face. “I can imagine,” he says.

Dagorael opens his mouth to ask something else, but Delhabad stands and says quickly, “I think we are done, Lady Celebrían. Come, Dagorael, let us go. We should let the lady settle into her apartment on her own.”

Celebrían smiles at them. “Thank you,” she says brightly, and stands as well to show them to the door. “Thank you for everything,” she adds as she sees them out.

“It was our pleasure,” said Delhabad, sketching a bow before leading the way down the concrete hallway and down the stairs.

Once they are gone, Celebrían turns back to her apartment, walking in and closing and locking the door behind her. She stands for a long moment in the entrance hall, just staring at the rooms laid out before her, bright and airy but cluttered, now, with boxes upon boxes of her things.

_I have a lot to do before the Grand Opening of the flower shop on Monday,_ she thinks—and sets to work.


End file.
